From the land to the lab: indium, researchers, and extraction
Waters are rising, ice is melting, and bushfires are burning. The ecological crisis we are experiencing is, at its root, caused by capitalist colonial extraction — hundreds of years of cutting down forests, digging up coal, and leaving toxic traces on stolen land through slave and exploited labour. Our world is shot through with extraction and its fruits. We use materials every day that were taken from the land in this way. Look around you: how many objects within sight do you know the origin of? Not the shop or the country they were manufactured in, but which acre of land, which smelter, which manufacturing facility? My guess is not one.
In order to oppose mining and exploitation of land and labour, we must understand it. Here, I hope to shed light on two things: how science and technology support extraction, and how one metal travels from land to lab. I write this because I wish for nothing less than for everyone involved with research and technology development to make significant changes to their research focus and process to resist the harms of extraction.
As people who use objects from the ground, the material of this essay affects us all. But its takeaways are particularly important for those of us with more power than the average consumer. This essay is aimed at all researchers involved with technology development at any stage — physicists, astronomers, engineers, computer scientists, and technology workers of all kinds. These are the people who can take the knowledge of their connection to technology and to the land and use it to make better decisions.
Researchers and Materials in the Lab
Technology and science are deeply enmeshed with the global system of extraction; these are the systems which create the objects that are made and sold for capital gains. Research decisions shape what materials are needed to create objects, and many people are responsible for series of decisions which lead a technology from the lab to mass production.
Using a particular metal for a piece of technology can increase demand for it. Indium-tin-oxide (ITO) is an alloy primarily used in the manufacture of LCD screens, making up most of the use of indium worldwide. Prior to commercial availability of technology which could manufacture a thin film of ITO, worldwide demand for indium was low. This metal is now one of many critical commodities for the production of technology — this started with research in the lab.
The experimental work that I’m most familiar with is that of quantum technology. These labs are energy intensive. Many of them use liquid helium in ultra-cold experiments. Specialized devices are made and used. Many of these devices use small amounts of materials like gallium, indium, and yttrium, in addition to silicon, aluminum, and copper, just to name a few.
One goal of this lab work is to make objects which can be used by corporations, military, and government. A major goal is to make a quantum computer. Manufacturing this technology at a commercial scale would require more of all of the metals currently used in these labs (plus more liquid helium, cooling energy, and more classical computers). When we ask for more resources, what is it that we are really asking for? What does it take to bring those metals from the ground to the lab?
When a researcher wants to use some metal to make a device, the decision-making process about whether to purchase and use that metal essentially never involves a conversation about where that metal comes from or what global resources are like. These discussions primarily focus on cost and effectiveness for the task at hand. Even when conservation and environmental harm is discussed, metals are rarely spoken about.
This attitude, which doesn’t consider metals as precious resources which come from the earth, is consistent with a dominant approach to research: that any new knowledge or new technology is an unqualified good. This mindset offsets potential or actual harm done by research by the value gained in knowledge production and, further, pays little attention to what harm is done. An accurate assessment of the cost of knowledge and technology production in human and environmental terms would surely find that in many cases, the cost (say, destroying mountains) is not justified by the gains (say, secret military communication).
Where does our stuff come from?
To accurately assess the cost of research, we have to know where stuff in the lab (and the tech industry) comes from. As it turns out, the origin of materials is incredibly difficult to pinpoint. On its way from the ground to a lab, a metal changes hands and forms many times. As ore, it may be mined by one person and sold to a co-op, who sells it to a mill. That mill produces a concentrate, which could be sold to another mill or a middleman before being sold to a smelter. The pure metal produced at the smelter could pass through one or more retailers and sometimes through labs at other research facilities before ending up in the lab. If the product being used is already made into technology, we can add a few layers of electronics manufacturers to this already convoluted supply chain. There is generally no requirement that a supplier disclose their suppliers. That’s considered proprietary information, important to a company’s value.
This is bananas. Not only do you not know where your laptop came from, but probably the company who sold it to you doesn’t totally know either. Some policy attempts have been made to illuminate these chains for so-called “conflict metals”, as in the US Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 and the EU’s conflict minerals legislation. These regulations attempt to force corporations to only purchase tin, tungsten, tantalum, and gold mined in ways which do not directly support local militia or unsafe mining practices in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Unfortunately, but perhaps not unsurprisingly, they have mostly failed at their most basic goal of minimizing financial support for militias. These policies make the significant error of assuming that conflict and unsafe conditions are local problems caused by negligent local government, rather than the result of hundreds of years of corporate and imperial violence and meddling in those governments.
Still, it is important that we understand extraction, and that requires understanding where things come from. We’ll revisit later what we can do with this information once we have some of it. Now that we understand the inscrutability of supply chains, though, how are we to tell where stuff in the lab comes from? For the moment, it’s not possible. What we can do, though, is look at a plausible supply chain, visiting key sites in its extraction to understand the process, its harms, and how we are connected to it.
Where might indium come from?
Indium is a metal critical to the production of screens and is currently used in a number of quantum technology labs to make quantum dots. It’s a fairly rare element, about twice as abundant as silver in the Earth’s crust. Nowhere on the planet does it exist in large quantities, either — it’s always a very small portion of zinc ore. We’ll sketch elements of a plausible path of indium from the ground to the lab, starting with independent miners in Bolivia and passing through a smelter in British Columbia.
Pleasant Mountain / Mountain of Riches
There is a mountain in central-south Bolivia known as Cerro Rico, or the mountain of riches. Its Quechua name is Sumaq Urqu — pleasant mountain. I’m sure it used to be a very pleasant place, before mining operations began in 1545. Today, the mountain looks like bare rock scrubbed clean by some great dish-washing god. Prior to 1545, the mountain was covered in trees.
The long and complex history of Cerro Rico and the town at its base called Potosí is full of colonial violence, environmental degradation, and exploited labour. The importance of this mine for Spanish power cannot be overstated; 60% of silver produced in the latter half of the 16th century came from Potosí. The city very quickly became one of the largest in the world — bigger than Rome, Paris, or Madrid in 1575 with a population of 120,000. Miners were almost exclusively Indigenous people from all over what was then the Viceroyalty of Peru, many of them conscripted into forced labour. After several decades of operation, African slaves were also forced into mining labour. For 475 years, the mountain has been deadly. Hundreds of thousands at a minimum have died in cave-ins and from mining- and smelting-related illness in the mountain that eats men.
Refining silver is a very energy-intensive process. Before we had mass amounts of fossil fuels to power smelters, we burned forests. The area around the mountain and the not-far-off mercury mine in Huancavelica, Peru, were deforested in a radius of dozens of kilometres. The mercury from Huancavelica was used to process the silver ore, and was leached into the ground and water at a rate of about 300 tons annually for decades around 1600. About a gram of mercury is enough to contaminate a small lake.
Though the mountain is at risk of a massive collapse, filled as it is with holes, the mines at Cerro Rico are still operational. For almost 500 years, poorly paid artisanal miners with little to no safety equipment have been digging and dying to retrieve silver, lead, zinc, antimony, and more. In fact, the mountain is 0.0012% indium by mass, thought to be perhaps the richest and largest indium deposit on the planet.
Bolivia is known in corporate mining circles as being one of the largest sources of indium. Yet miners taking it out of the ground do not benefit from being the foundational part of indium production. The ore of Cerro Rico is a rich complex of metals, and miners know it well. They can identify zinc, lead, and silver in the rock by sight. Indium, being only 0.0012% of the deposit, is not identifiable in this way. Miners in the area, for the most part, aren’t aware that they are digging up and selling indium. Mills get to set prices for the ore they buy from workers, and since the mills don’t acknowledge the existence of indium in the ore, these workers are paid far less than their materials are worth, in addition to working in deadly conditions.
Mills in Potosí produce concentrates from ore — roughly purified silver or zinc. The capital needed to refine them further and to isolate the trace metals like indium does not exist within Bolivia. The lack of refining technology in the Global South is created by and maintains the unequal distribution of wealth in the world; the North takes the materials from the land and most of the profits accrued from processing them. In fact, these mills haven’t even been aware that there are also seeling valuable trace metals like indium in these concentrates. International companies like Glencore and Teck purchase the material and refine it further, but since there is essentially no acknowledgement that they are purchasing indium, there is no record of how indium makes its way out of the country or taxes paid on it to the Bolivian government.
Cerro Rico is a sobering and emblematic case study of how colonial capitalist extraction operates. This mountain of riches, its people, and the land around have been violently exploited for centuries for the vast material gain of other nations. Though the nature of colonialism has changed, it is still ubiquitous. While Spain no longer rules Potosí, multi-national corporate and state structures have worked hard to ensure that Bolivians cannot take production of their land into their own hands, let alone control its fate outside of the strictures of production. The socio-ecological harms wrought are lasting.
Where does the land go from here? China, South Korea, Canada, and Japan host the top producers of indium worldwide — as in, companies who take in concentrates and produce high-purity indium. It’s likely that smelters in all of these countries source some of their indium from Bolivia.
Sinixt tum-xula7xw / Trail, British Columbia
One of the largest indium smelters in the world is in Trail, British Columbia in Canada. Owned by Teck Resources Limited, it is also the largest lead and zinc smelter in North America. Teck doesn’t release its indium supplier information, but it’s likely that they have made purchases of Bolivian concentrate. This enormous industrial operation is a bastion of colonialism and environmental damage in western so-called Canada.
The land now known as British Columbia to many has been the home of dozens of nations for many thousands of years. The town of Trail is the traditional territory of the Sinixt, Syilx, and Ktunaxa nations. Though the British made a royal proclamation in 1763 asserting that no settlement was to take place on the continent without a treaty, the vast majority of B.C. is settled without any treaties. In 1875, the B.C. government tried to bypass the need for treaties with the B.C. Lands Act. That was struck down by the federal government, but the 1876 Indian Act asserted federal control over all Indigenous peoples anyway. The promise of mining riches drew settlers to the interior, first for the Cariboo gold rush, and then for rich veins of zinc, lead, and coal.
The politically strong Sinixt nation was likely decimated in population by a smallpox epidemic in the late 1700s. Their territory, Sinixt tum-xula7xw, was never ceded. They remained a strong political force for some time, resisting appropriation of their lands by settlers. The colonial Canada-U.S. border divided their lands. In the 1900s, many of them moved below the border, and in 1956, the Canadian state declared them extinct — a declaration the definitely-not-extinct Sinixt reject.
The town of Trail was established in Sinixt territory around the smelter and mines in the area in the late 1800s. The smelter has been operational since 1896 and has been at the core of the town for all that time. The mayor of Trail, a former Teck employee, has said, “Teck is Trail and Trail is Teck.”
From the founding of the smelter to 1995, it dumped over 12 million tons of slag directly into the Columbia River. On average, that’s 400 tons per day of particulate matter loaded with arsenic, zinc, and lead. In 1994, the smelter released more copper and zinc into the river than all American companies were allowed to release into American waters for the entire year. This sediment traveled south across the U.S. border and mostly settler in Lake Roosevelt, a reservoir located on the lands of the Colville Federation of Tribes, which includes the Sinixt, some 150 km south of Trail.
Presence of toxic metals in rivers has decreased life expectancy of salmon and sturgeon. Most salmon extirpation in the Pacific Northwest has been caused by dam-building, but salmon populations have also declined in accessible areas due to pollution. The state of Washington has recommended since 1994 to not eat salmon due to mercury. In 2004, a member of the Colville Federation shared this: “You hear stories from the elders of how the [Columbia] river used to be and Kettle falls being able to walk across the river on the backs of the salmon. Now… they are afraid to eat the fish.”
The Colville Federation brought a civil suit against Teck in 2004 under the Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund legislation. After 14 years in court, Teck was ordered to provide 8.25 million USD to the Tribes and is responsible for an estimated 1 billion USD cleanup cost. It’s not clear that this will happen quickly; no timeline or strategy has been publicized. It’s not even clear that the river can be ‘cleaned up’ or that monetary costs can make up for the damage wrought.
Fish are life in Sinixt territory. Salmon are a keystone species, cycling nutrients from the oceans to the forests and their people. Can money replace nutrient cycling between ecosystems? Can it feed people? Is it part of a more-than-human ecosystem? We cannot equivocate all impacts to monetary costs.
After the smelter
Teck sells bars of high-purity indium to re-sellers like Sigma Aldrich and Indium Corporation, who sell it to lab workers. As mentioned above, these workers are usually only expected to consider cost and function when choosing materials to use in their experiments.
What might be done with indium? It is used in solar cells, quantum dots, and nanocircuits. It might be made into a thin sheet for use in nanocircuits with a technique called sputtering, in which hot metal is sprayed out atom by atom to coat a silicon chip and the entire chamber it is housed in. Some materials like indium phosphide are fabricated by intermediary companies and sold to labs; this semiconductor is particularly useful in optoelectronic systems like lasers.
Again, indium’s main commercial use is in the indium tin oxide coating of LCD screens. It is widely used as a semiconductor in the form of indium arsenide and coats glass as an anti-reflection agent. The market is relatively small; adding a new category of usage to the indium market could have a significant influence.
Conclusions
I’ve sketched a plausible supply chain for indium: from high-quality ores in Bolivia mined by people risking their lives who are not compensated for the indium they have pulled from the ground to an enormous smelter in so-called British Columbia tied up with hundreds of years of violence to re-sellers to laboratories. We have no way to be sure that any given piece of indium has actually traveled this path. But it’s clear that social and environmental violence of the kind outlined here are part and parcel of extraction. This plausible supply chain demonstrates likely features of the actual path of the metals used in the lab. They are features worth attempting to combat.
Scientists must build relationships with the land. Robin Wall Kimmerer suggests that naming is a step in knowing; through knowing and respecting, we build relationships. We must acknowledge that the material in our labs is land, brought to us through labour and socio-ecological violence. Knowing the land means knowing its history and the processes which have brought it to us. Part of our research time can be dedicated to learning about where our materials come from.
What do you do when you know more about where things come from? It isn’t the fault of miners in Bolivia that they aren’t compensated for the indium they pull from the ground or that they come from a long line of people working in a dangerous mountain. We can’t pretend like everything that’s bad about mining is perpetrated by actors local to the mine. Scientists and tech companies are asking for this ore to be extracted. We must acknowledge the imperial nature of mining and take responsibility for it by changing what and how much we are asking for and by acting in solidarity with workers and ecosystems.
If we are trying to live justly and sustainably, we must blur the line between academic and activist. Scientists could take knowledge of the land we use and change our research practices. We can support people whose health is harmed in dangerous work extracting ore from the ground, or those who never agreed to mining on their lands in the first place, or the sturgeon who die young and the people who once relied on them.
Acting in solidarity with communities in resistance — fundraising, protesting, information-sharing, network-building — is part of changing the way we use materials in the lab. As we build capacity in solidarity, we can begin to more accurately consider the weight of using resources in our research. We can slow down. Follow the principles of green chemistry. We can design our projects with space for doing things carefully and ask that our colleagues and grant-providers do the same. We can question ourselves deeply about what we really need: is the technology we are working towards worth the human and environmental impact of extracting the materials used to build it? And we could ask this question whenever we go to make a new purchase of high-purity metal. What might be different about labs if they had environmental impact limitations on their materials in addition to budgets? If they considered what the impact might be if their technologies were scaled up?
As we work towards tangible improvements to people’s lives and defense of ecosystems, I hope we build a big picture of the problem. It’s not a problem only with imperial treatment of Bolivia or with Teck. You can’t find another, cleaner smelter and be done. We can’t find a way to mine indium or anything else sustainably. Money cannot fix holes in the earth. We are coercing humans to take it out of the ground. We can’t put it back. Is everything that we are doing in the lab worth it?
If you work with indium in your lab and you’d like to talk, please reach out via Twitter @electroweak or email at emma.m.mckay@gmail.com.
